In the living room, a painting by Richard Smith is displayed above the fireplace, while a Cy Twombly print dominates another wall; the midcentury yellow chairs are by Nanna Ditzel, and the button-tufted armchairs, clad in a Holly Hunt fabric, are a vintage design by Kerstin Hörlin-Holmquist. The sofas, covered in a Donghia fabric, and the window treatments are all by Jonas.

In the living room, a painting by Richard Smith is displayed above the fireplace, while a Cy Twombly print dominates another wall; the midcentury yellow chairs are by Nanna Ditzel, and the button-tufted armchairs, clad in a Holly Hunt fabric, are a vintage design by Kerstin Hörlin-Holmquist. The sofas, covered in a Donghia fabric, and the window treatments are all by Jonas.

In the living room, a painting by Richard Smith is displayed above the fireplace, while a Cy Twombly print dominates another wall; the midcentury yellow chairs are by Nanna Ditzel, and the button-tufted armchairs, clad in a Holly Hunt fabric, are a vintage design by Kerstin Hörlin-Holmquist. The sofas, covered in a Donghia fabric, and the window treatments are all by Jonas.

This article originally appeared in the November 2012 issue of Architectural Digest.

Wanting change is inevitable, even when you live in a pitch-perfect house created by two aesthetic masters. In 1993 an art-collecting couple in East Hampton, New York, commissioned a shingle-clad Colonial Revival manse from Robert A.M. Stern, now the dean of the Yale School of Architecture. They then had it decorated by the great American traditionalist Mark Hampton, who brought in Windsor chairs, spindly candlestick lamps, and creaking wicker and arranged them sparely, like sculptures in a gallery. Two decades on, however, the owners were ready for something new.

“The house needed to feel more contemporary,” explains the wife, noting that her two grandchildren spend holidays and summer vacations at the waterfront home. “I’d been keeping a file of magazine articles about houses I liked and realized four of them were by Shelton, Mindel—so I called.”

Lee F. Mindel, cofounder, with the late Peter Shelton, of the New York City architecture and interior design firm Shelton, Mindel & Associates, is a modernist with a keen appreciation for classical architecture. So he was intrigued by the challenge of recasting the decor while preserving Stern’s vision. “We knew we could apply the principles of modernism without undermining the home’s traditional appearance,” Mindel says. “We could dematerialize the spaces to emphasize the light and the views.” Except for gutting the kitchen, he basically left the structure and its classic detailing intact. “It was important for us to honor the building—we were changing something that did not need to be changed,” insists the architect. “There is no surface that was left untouched, but there has been a lot of respect for what came before.”

Mindel’s interpretation of the double-height entrance hall, for example, turns the space into a metaphor. “It’s a neutral buffer, like a dune before you get to the beach and see the water,” he says. “So we made allusions to natural elements.” The silk rug resembles a field of sand, and the ceiling fixture, by Mauro Fabbro, suggests a Cubist cloud formation. As the architect points out, “Whether you are looking down at the light from the second-story landing or walking beneath it, you have a sense of the surrounding landscape.”

Shelton, Mindel & Assoc. refreshed a family’s East Hampton, New York, home, which was built by architect Robert A.M. Stern in 1993. The main façade of the shingled house.

To highlight the residence’s bucolic views and allow the couple’s 20th-century art (works by Milton Avery, Jennifer Bartlett, and Cy Twombly, to name just a few) to shine, Mindel painted the walls white throughout and stained the floors dark. Curtains made of two layers of transparent linen modulate the natural light, creating, the architect says, “a diaphanous watercolor effect, depending on the time of day.” While the white sconces in the living and dining rooms melt into the background, other fixtures serve as punctuation. A brass chandelier by postwar Italian designer Angelo Lelli radiates against the ceiling of the library like a supernova, and in the dining room, two circa-1955 pendant lights by Max Ingrand “hover like butterflies,” as Mindel puts it, over the elegantly pared-down dining tables and chairs he had made for the space.

The interiors, though radically different than they were in the 1990s, blend seamlessly with Stern’s discreet architecture. (As the wife confides, “I told Bob Stern I didn’t want a lot of quirks.”) With the exception of a billiard table and a pair of slipper chairs that were refined with new upholstery and simpler legs, the cozy Mark Hampton decor was jettisoned in favor of low-key vintage pieces by tip-top 20th-century names—many of them Scandinavian—and bespoke furnishings by Mindel and his team. Curvaceous ’50s chairs by eminent Swedish designers Kerstin Hörlin-Holmquist and Carl Malmsten encircle a Jean Royère cocktail table in the center of the living room, while yellow fiberglass bucket chairs by Nanna Ditzel, one of the architect’s favorite Danish designers, flank the fireplace. The latter chairs provide “a bit of playfulness that cuts through the seriousness,” he says. “I think they look like little sand pails.”

It’s hardly the only wink of color in the dwelling. The living room’s off-white custom-made rugs are bordered with bands of blue, yellow, green, and red that are reminiscent of sky, sun, and the wild grasses and rugosa roses that flourish nearby. Brightly hued light fixtures in the breakfast area and adjoining family room recall beach glass. Upstairs, an ottoman and chairs upholstered in confectionery shades of pink and green sweeten a minimalist bedroom that is outfitted with striking black-and-white images of windswept dunes and rolling waves by contemporary photographers such as Chip Hooper and Richard Calvo. Touches like these, deliberate yet subtle, give the interiors a laid-back, lighthearted quality that suits the three generations sharing them.

“The house doesn’t look like it belongs to only the grandparents or the children,” Mindel proudly observes. “It has a kind of democracy about it.”

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